Cannes Report: 'Carol,' a Swooning Lesbian Romance From Todd Haynes

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in ‘Carol’ (The Weinstein Company)

A day after Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees got some boos from the press corps at Cannes, Todd Haynes’s period romance Carol earned bravos at its press screening. The rave reviews came soon after. The cheers were well-deserved — as was the insanely early awards-season chatter both for the movie and for the stunning performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. A remarkably well-made in-competition drama, Carol is a marvel: A stirring, obsessive romance, it evokes a 1950s New York that feels both impossibly distant and unmistakably familiar. It’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, about two women who embark on a dangerous affair — dangerous, only because the consequences in Eisenhower America could be so high.

Carol is structured as a flashback: We open with Therese (Mara) and Carol (Blanchett) sitting at a table in an elegant tea room. The meeting is fraught, but we won’t know why until almost the end of the movie. (Delayed gratification is one of Haynes’ strongest moves here.) We learn that the two met in December when the twentysomething Therese was a counter clerk at a department store — apparently, working holiday retail was just as soul-sucking 60 years ago. Carol, an older, elegant woman from the ‘burbs, swoops into the store like a vision in a full-length fur and catches Therese staring at her. After a brief, loaded exchange, Carol manages to leave both her address and her gloves behind.

WASP-y, monied Carol is divorcing her high-brow husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) who knows about her attraction to women — she’d once had a fling with her lesbian best friend, Abby (Sarah Paulson). In a fit of rage, he files for sole custody of their young daughter over a morality clause that threatens to become less and less of a euphemism. When Carol finds herself alone over Christmas, she invites Therese on a road trip out West — a slow-burn journey that edges closer and closer to the inevitable consummation, a surprisingly hot sex scene that takes a surprisingly long time to happen.

Blanchett is entrancing here, but in some ways she’s got the easier, showier role. The magnetic Mara pulls off something more complex: Quiet and watchful, Therese has to seem both unsure of herself and sure about what she desires. Thankfully, Haynes also doesn’t fall back on easy villains: Chandler’s Harge isn’t a cartoonish bad guy, and neither is Richard (Jake Lacy), Therese’s kind, dopey boyfriend who takes a while to understand that she’s just not that into him.

Carol will draw inevitable comparisons to Haynes’ other 1950s-set drama, Far From Heaven. When that movie came out in 2002, there was a lot of discussion about the inspiration Haynes found in vintage Douglas Sirk melodramas like All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. It was intriguing, but it also made the movie sound like an experiment. Carol feels like the next step: a melodrama that doesn’t have to be melodramatic, one that feels lived-in and moving. Highsmith’s The Price of Salt was unusual for lesbian pulp of the time because it didn’t end in death or tragedy or a return to a straight life. Even in the rigid time in which it’s set, Carol also imagines a world open to possibilities.